Black Breath of the Nazgûl

Jul 23, 2007 | Australian Values, Border Security, Corruption, Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Immigration, Legal, OzPol Values, Religious Values, Terrorism, Values, War

Black Breath of the Nazgûl

AKA Phillip Ruddock  AKA ‘Dock Vader

How dare ordinary ‘people’ have “views!” 

 

Asked on Southern Cross radio whether the case was a mess, he replied:
“No, what I think has happened is that people who have views about the nature of the law are determined to try and bring it into disrepute. That’s what I think is happening.”

Yes, that is exactly what is happening in some quarters.

Those who believe that they own the law and that the law is a tool for re-election, or for legal validation of unethical and immoral policy, or for the pursuit of personal agendas, are certainly bringing it into disrepute.

Elsewhere, what is happening is that — by revealing information about the way the law is being used and abused, and by debating processes and procedures — people who care about the law and its already tenuous relationship with “justice” are illustrating how the law is a bad law, how the law is being used disreputably and how the law in general is being debauched by the government and its stooges.

For your interest, if any, here are the relevant sections of the Crimes Act that relate to Haneef’s charge:

102.7 Providing support to a terrorist organisation…..

(2) A person commits an offence if:

(a) the person intentionally provides to an organisation support or resources that would help the organisation engage in an activity described in paragraph (a) of the definition of terrorist organisation in this Division; and(b) the organisation is a terrorist organisation; and(c) the person is reckless as to whether the organisation is a terrorist organisation.

Penalty: Imprisonment for 15 years.

_________________
terrorist organisation means:

(a) an organisation that is directly or indirectly engaged in, preparing, planning, assisting in or fostering the doing of a terrorist act (whether or not a terrorist act occurs); or
(b) an organisation that is specified by the regulations for the purposes of this paragraph (see subsections (2), (3) and (4)).

_________________

“member” of an organisation includes:

(a) a person who is an informal member of the organisation; and

(b) a person who has taken steps to become a member of the organisation; and

(c) in the case of an organisation that is a body corporate–a director or an officer of the body corporate.

_________________

terrorist act means an action or threat of action where:

(a) the action falls within subsection (2) and does not fall within subsection (3); and

(b) the action is done or the threat is made with the intention of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause; and (c) the action is done or the threat is made with the intention of:

(i) coercing, or influencing by intimidation, the government of the Commonwealth or a State, Territory or foreign country, or of part of a State, Territory or foreign country; or

(ii) intimidating the public or a section of the public.

_________________
(2) Action falls within this subsection if it:

(a) causes serious harm that is physical harm to a person; or

(b) causes serious damage to property; or

(c) causes a person’s death; or(

d) endangers a person’s life, other than the life of the person taking the action; or

(e) creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public; or(

f) seriously interferes with, seriously disrupts, or destroys, an electronic system including, but not limited to:

(i) an information system; or

(ii) a telecommunications system; or

(iii) a financial system; or

(iv) a system used for the delivery of essential government services; or

(v) a system used for, or by, an essential public utility; or

(vi) a system used for, or by, a transport system.

(3) Action falls within this subsection if it:

(a) is advocacy, protest, dissent or industrial action; and

(b) is not intended:

(i) to cause serious harm that is physical harm to a person; or

(ii) to cause a person’s death; or

(iii) to endanger the life of a person, other than the person taking the action; or

(iv) to create a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public.

Note that the law clearly requires you to satisfy yourself  that any person to whom you render a service or a “resource” which may conceivably assist a member of a terrorist organisation to perform, or conceive, or plan, or prepare, or assist a terrorist act — a packet of nails, say, or a bottle of Ammonia, or a map, or a tank of petrol — is not a member of a terrorist organisation. And the evidentiary burden that you took sufficient steps to satisfy yourself of this probably rests with you.

Luckily for the government, it could be argued (although we don’t) that the Government itself would be guilty of a “threat made with the intention of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause”, “coercing, or influencing by intimidation”, “intimidating the public or a section of the public” if it weren’t for subsection (3).

On the other hand, it could also be argued, surely (although we don’t), that the government’s invasion of Iraq was intended “to cause serious harm that is physical harm to a person and to cause a person’s death, and to endanger the life of a person, other than the person taking the action” (who was safe in Canberra), and “to create a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public” (at least the Iraqi public).

Pardon Us – We Missed the Logic

Jul 17, 2007 | Australian Values, Border Security, Corruption, Democracy, Immigration, Legal, OzPol Values, Values

Pardon Us – We Missed the Logic

We’re just a bit confused 

 

Dr Haneef has been charged with recklessly providing resources to a terrorist organisation (to wit, a sim card). The alleged recklessness occurred in the UK. It did not take place in Australia.

There is no suggestion, as far as we can know, that Haneef has broken any law in Australia.

No-one in Britain has yet been found guilty of being a terrorist or part of a “terrorist organisation”.

The British allegations are still ‘allegations’.

The charge against Haneef therefore presumes the British suspects are guilty and that they are, or are part of, a terrorist organisation. 

They may well be, but that is not how the law in both our countries is supposed to work. Australia, in any case, simply cannot, has no authority to, determine the guilt or innocence of a person in a foreign jurisdiction. That is done by courts and juries in the jurisdiction where they are charged. Or can they? It does seem, logically, that they have indeed predetermined that guilt given the charge against Haneef.

This presumption of guilt then would/will prejudice the trial of Haneef’s cousin to whom he gave the sim card. Could Haneef’s cousin conceivably claim the impossibility of a fair trial on the basis of the charges against Haneef?

And what then, or what if the British suspects are simply found not guilty? Haneef could not then be found to have provided resources to a terrorist organisation. (And before you say “that’s not going to happen, of course they are guilty”, remember that you are not entitled to presume that, nor to act on the presumption of guilt.)

The correct course of action after Haneef’s interrogation, which involved a British police officer, was surely to allow the British to use any information that was discovered to request the extradition of Haneef to Britain. As far as we know they have made no such request. If they had thought that there was sufficient evidence to justify such a request, they would have made it, wouldn’t they, the alleged offence having been committed in the British jurisdiction?

Why does all this matter? Is it to protect terrorists? Absolutely not.

It is that, as we have already noted, if we wish to protect our own liberty and freedom we must also protect the rights of our enemies. If we do not we establish a precedent that will come back to bite us. If we do not honour and cherish our own legal values – like justice, due process, habeas corpus and the presumption of innocence – then we practise and invite the practice of oppression in all our lives and we become as oppressive as the regimes and ideologies from which we seek to protect ourselves, using the threat of those odious regimes as an excuse.

If, of course, you were Mick [“Let’s show those drug-running kids some real Indonesian-style ‘Life or Death’ justice”] Keelty and his mates, you might just think that it was a bugger that the law gets in the way of justice. And that’s our system.

And we’ll tell you what. We don’t want Mick Keelty to protect us, or John Howard, or Kevin Andrews.

We want our system, our values and our way of life to protect us.

The SIEV X-Factor

Jul 7, 2007 | Australian Values, Border Security, Corruption, Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Immigration, Legal, Media Values, OzPol Values, Values

The SIEV X-Factor

“A Certain Maritime Incident”

 

Richard Fidler interviewed  Tony Kevin on ABC’s Conversation Hour  last week.
Tony Kevin is an activist who was one of the driving forces behind the campaign to uncover, and especially to tell, the truth about the sinking of the SIEV X in which approximately 353 children, women and men drowned.

He was a highly commended and respected Ambassador, including to Russia, and to Cambodia in the 90s. He has written a book, Walking the Camino, about the experience of travelling the pilgrim route from Andalusia to the north of Spain.

However, his reputation as a diplomat was no defence against the vitriol which was spat at him when he dared question the government’s morality and border protection policies.

“   I guess I identified very closely with the human rights of refugees and Australia’s obligations… I was denounced in the parliament as a person of no credibility; I was abused by three senators in a senate committee…”

But Tony Kevin said some things that really struck a chord with us.

“  In a democracy every citizen is responsible for the conduct of their government and if their government behaves in unethical or even criminal ways every citizen has a responsibility within their capacity to challenge that and that’s why I was one of the forty-three former diplomats and former senior military personnel who signed the statement condemning the Australian involvement in the war in Iraq, which I believe was a criminal activity. And I guess you’ve just got to basically, sometimes, stand up and be counted. That’s the entry ticket we pay for continuing to enjoy a democracy.

And he says something about the illusion in which we all, journalists and pundits included, live and take for granted – that while most of us are decent and reasonably honest and fair-minded we assume politics and politicians are also.

Many of us have assumed that what has been going on in Australian politics has been business as usual with a right-wing twist. We have been in denial, in our complacency, that what has been going on in the past eleven and a half years has in fact been a shift to the extremist right and the debauching of basic Australian political and civil service standards. Surely there could not have been such a shift, not in our country.

Tony Kevin saw it clearly.

“  What I’ve tried to do myself is to challenge the idea that the last eleven years have been years of normality. I don’t believe they have. I believe they’ve been years of moral dysfunction in Australia and to the extent that I can continue to convey that, without blaming people, without pointing fingers at people, I plan to continue to do that.

In fact, in a speech at the Manning Clark House Weekend of Ideas in April, Kevin spoke about the fragility and transparency of our illusion about our system and our way of life.

“  Confronting the SIEV X cover-up forced me to look down into the abyss that lies beneath our “presumption of regularity” – the phrase is Jack Waterford’s – a presumption that we rely on in our daily lives in society.

I understand now that my exposure to this abyss was a full grief trauma…Walking through Manuka, seeing people enjoying themselves in restaurants, I wanted to scream — “Wake up to the horrors of what our government is doing to defenceless people in our names! How can you still pretend that we live in a normal decent country”? It is hard to look into that abyss for a long time without damage, without succumbing to depression or self-destructive rage.

In this speech he also described what happened to him as a result of his outspoken dissent and activism.

“  These are the refugee dissent suppression strategies I encountered:

 

1. Put out claimed facts that are actually untrue, relying on the public’s presumption that governments normally do not lie to the public, except in grave national security emergencies.

2. Force truth-seekers into the roles of advocates or activists. Blur debates about the facts in specific cases of abuse of human rights, by trying to move the debate into unresolvable discussions about values.

3. Drive wedges to weaken the solidarity of dissent. Use frightener words to marginalize and discredit passionate or influential dissenters, words like “extremist”, “fanatic”, “conspiracy theorist”, “Howard-hater”, “disloyal”, “un-Australian”.

4. Workplace or NGO-funding sanctions. Implied threats against those in government or government-funded employment, or threats to cut off funding to NGOs that support refugee activism.

5. Guilt trips. Accuse dissenters of prolonging victims’ distress through holding out false hopes, or of undermining national security. Play games with dissenters’ minds, aimed at undermining their belief in the justice of their causes. Seek to make them feel more isolated.

6. Never give credit to dissenters when they succeed. Always pretend that any decisions to soften the system were not taken under pressure.

 

On point 1, the SIEV X public history is full of examples of false and shifting stories put out by government:

 

On where the boat sank: First, that it sank in Indonesian waters. Later, that “we don’t know where it sank”. Then, an admission that it sank in international waters. But then, a later reversion to “we don’t know where it sank”.

 

On what we knew about the voyage. First, that we knew nothing till we saw the TV news of the sinking. Then, that we knew the boat was coming, but we did not know when or from where. We cannot tell you what we knew, because it’s intelligence; or, because it is the subject of an ongoing investigation. Or a variant from Mick Keelty: that you will just have to take our word for it that we did not know about the boat until it was too late to save the passengers. Because it’s “operational”, we cannot offer proof of this claim.

 

Were we expecting the boat? Yes, we were expecting the boat at Christmas Island on 21 October and that is why we sent a distress message to Indonesian Search and Rescue when it failed to arrive on time. But later – no, we did not put out a distress call to the ADF or to all shipping, because we then assumed that the boat had never left or it had turned back.

 

Did we ever look for the boat? No, we didn’t. Yes, we did – and here to prove are the RAAF surveillance maps and records of boat sightings, plastered all over the front page of the Weekend Australian on 29 June 2002, when media concern about SIEV X was at its peak But later – Yes, we did fly over the area, but only as part of routine RAAF surveillance patrols, because our aircrews were never tasked to look for a missing boat. And the flight charts and sightings data we tabled in the Senate and that the Senate accepted as fact were really just approximate flight paths. No, you cannot see our aircrew flight reports or know the names of the crews, because that’s all classified information. And according to the Defence Minister in 2005, the evidence the ADF gave in 2002 — despite all the conclusively forensic analysis by Marg Hutton of its many inconsistencies — was the whole truth.

 

Do we know the names of the dead? Initially, as reported — the UNHCR is preparing and collating lists of the dead and survivors. Later from the AFP — there are no such lists. Later — there are some lists but it is unlikely they will ever be made public.

And so on and on. One phoney smokescreen was put up after another until a frustrated and jaded media abandoned the story, having found no way to distinguish between truth and lies.

You can read Kevin’s testimony to the Senate Inquiry into “A Certain Maritime Incident” at the SIEV X site.

Fidler asked Kevin whether his SIEV X research and advocacy since 2002 had been worth it.

“  Yes. I think my work achieved useful results going beyond SIEV X. It helped more people to see the truth behind the now discredited myth that John Howard is just another Australian politician trying to do his job more or less decently. Australians know the real Howard now. I think my SIEV X research and advocacy helped to expose the ugly truth about this man.

Quite so.

 

 

Spelling It Out

Apr 30, 2007 | Australian Values, Corruption, Democracy, OzPol Values, Terrorism, USPol, Values, War

Spelling It Out

 

Okay, no surprise…

The Bush White House lied to the American people.

…Except that one of the people who knew it at the time, a US Senator, has dropped a “Bombshell on the Senate Floor”.

So here it is at last. Not the smoking gun we had before but the political mushroom cloud which should explode George Bush’s presidency and John Howard’s career. Should…but…you know…

US Senator Dick Durbin, who was on the Senate Intelligence Committee during the lead up to the Iraq war, explained the truth of what was actually going on behind the scenes in top secret intelligence briefings in 2002-2003 and how it compared with what the White House was spruiking publicly.

Durbin and his fellow committee members knew that George Bush and his administration were intentionally misleading the world but they couldn’t say anything:

Excerpt from Durbin’s statement:

“  The Intelligence Committee was meeting on a daily basis for top-secret briefings about the information we were receiving and the information we had in the Intelligence Committee was not the same information being given to the American people. I couldn’t believe it.

Members of this administration were in active, heated debate over whether Aluminum tubes really meant that the Iraqis were developing nuclear weapons, some within the administration were saying, “Of course not. It’s not the same kind of aluminum tube,” at the same time that members of the administration were telling the American people to be fearful of mushroom-shaped clouds.

But unfortunately, as a member of the Committee, he was sworn to secrecy.

“  We can’t walk outside the door and say, “The statement made yesterday by the White House is in direct contradiction to classified information that’s been given to this Congress…

And so in my frustration I sat here on the floor of the Senate and listened to this heated debate about invading Iraq, thinking, “The American people are being misled. They’re not being told the truth.”

Who also knew what Senator Durbin and his colleagues knew?

The President, George W. Bush.

The National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice had to know.

Cheney. Rove. Rumsfeld. Wolfowitz. Feith. Chalabi.

Obviously the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, had to know. What sort of a “man” will intentionally and knowingly lie, not just to his own country but to the entire world, knowing that the lies he tells will certainly lead to the premeditated, and unjustified, deaths and maiming of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings? How does such a “man” choose to do that? How does such a “man” live with himself?

And then there are Tony Blair and John Howard. They must have been told the truth. After all, they are the United States’ most respected allies and George Bush’s best friends. He would not have lied his best mates into such a war.

So Howard knew there was no substance to – or at the very least, serious disagreement about – the so-called “evidence” which he used to take Australia to war (against the wishes of the people, by the way). Blair and Campbell even sexed up and fabricated evidence because even the lies weren’t convincing enough.

If Howard knew the truth he was murderously reckless with other people’s – and other people’s children’s – lives.

If Howard was told the truth he has no respect for, belief in, or sense of responsibility to the Australian people.

Or if Howard did not know the truth then the only alternative is that he is a gullible fool who credulously bought a pack of lies.

If Howard was not told the truth the so-called close and special relationship between the USA and Australia is a sham and an embarrassment.

If Howard was not told the truth the USA has no respect for Australia, and the alliance has no value.

If Howard was not told the truth he is a shocking judge of character with an appalling choice of friends.

A person who tells such lies to his country is a traitor and a criminal.
A person who premeditates the deaths of innocent others is a murderer.
A person who lies to commit premeditated slaughter on this scale is not just a mass-murderer. He is a criminal psychopath.

Sadly, although I believe this statement by Senator Durbin is explosive – because it blows away the last remnants of Bush/Blair/Howard’s pretence – I don’t expect to see it repeated on Page One in the mainstream media. But I would love to hear how the usual suspects play it down and excuse it. Let me guess.

“It’s old news.”

“I think the Australian public has moved past that.”

“How we got there is no longer the issue. What’s important is what we do now.”

Swallowing Bullshit Whole

Apr 27, 2007 | Australian Values, Corruption, Democracy, Media Values, OzPol Values, Terrorism, USPol, Values, War

Swallowing Bullshit Whole

Buying the War – Bill Moyers

How did the mainstream press get it so wrong about Iraq?

 

This may be the most “important” video you will see this year.
It’s a special program from Bill Moyers Journal on PBS.

Buying the War is a careful, thorough, chilling expose of how the American, and in fact almost the entire Western, mainstream media lost their scepticism, their perspective and their judgment along with all their highly-trained journalistic principles, swallowed whole the Bush administration’s predigested Iraq scam and palmed it off onto a gullible, frightened and sometimes hysterical public.

It is particularly urgent because the men who took us there are still in power and still in denial, still refusing to admit they made a mistake despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary – in stark contrast to the almost total lack of factual evidence which could support the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq in the first place.

John Howard stakes his career and his credibility on the assertion that he made a wise and well-informed decision. How excited he was that Australia had been part of providing solid evidence – the aluminium tubes, remember? – of Iraq’s nuclear program. Except they weren’t for a nuclear anything. He has never apologised for that. Never admitted it was a mistake. He will never apologise to the families (what is left of them) of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis whose death he is by collusion responsible for, or the 2 million Iraqi refugees, or the 2 million Iraqis internally displaced. Or to the thousands of coalition soldiers and civilians killed and maimed in Iraq.

But he made a big, big mistake.

Either he was a willing co-conspirator in the Iraq catastrophe or he was duped. In either case that is not good enough to be Prime Minister of Australia.

The same is true of John Howard’s echo-chamber, the right-wing commentariat of people like Albrechtsen, Ackerman, Bolt, Devine all the other friends of Rupert – apologists for the Groveller General who nevertheless will never (like him) apologise for the egregious errors of judgment and fact that they have made and propagated for so long.

[One of the arguments given by those who supported the war, including Howard and his sycophantic media cheer-squad, and current US Presidential candidates like Clinton, is that “everyone believed Iraq did have WMDs”. That is not true.

Values Australia didn’t believe it for a minute, not just because we are a government-certified political clairvoyant but because we studied the political context, we looked at the so-called evidence and the way it was presented, the people who were presenting it and their probable motives, along with the evidence against it and the credibility of the people who presented that.

Values Australia was not alone. Millions of people around the world agreed. The difference is that these people are not afraid of the US Administration, or Murdoch, or the electorate. The difference is that we did not think the deaths of others and the carnage which we predicted would be a fair price for others to pay to protect our careers.

Moyers talks to the most senior journalists, including those who bought the Administration’s line, like Dan Rather, and those who didn’t, like Knight Ridder and those who claim to be pawns, like Tim Russert.

He shows how the propaganda was manufactured. For example, the White House needed to “prove” that Saddam Hussein had an atomic weapons program. There were those intercepted aluminium tubes, but that was top, top secret. Even Cheney couldn’t talk about them. So what he did was to leak the story to the New York Times who, of course, published it and Cheney was then able to comment on the story the next day on Meet the Press with Tim Russert.

“    It is now public that he has been seeking to acquire … the kinds of tubes that are necessary … in order to build a bomb.”

The guy has balls. But they’re huge bags of bullshit. What he doesn’t have is a conscience or morality. He is a professional liar who has forgotten, if he ever knew, how to tell the truth. And he is one of John Howard’s greatest mates.

What is especially chilling is the masterful way in which the Bush administration, probably under the guidance of Karl Rove, manipulated a willing, compliant media and engineered the stories. Remember the “smoking gun” that was about to turn into a “mushroom cloud” – the urgency in that which supposedly justified the pre-emptive invasion? Over and over again. Al Qaeda/Iraq/al Qaeda/Iraq/al Qaeda/Iraq repeated and repeated until with no evidence whatever, and after any link had been soundly disproven, most Americans still believed (as many still do, and as Cheney to this day suggests) that Iraq was responsible for 9/11.

 

Watch the video here.

Perhaps the most telling moment is Dan Rather‘s admission of:

“  …the fear that if you don’t go along, you get the reputation for being a troublemaker. There’s also the fear that, particularly in networks, they’ve become huge international conglomerates. They have big needs, legislative needs, regulatory needs, in Washington. Nobody has to send you a memo to tell you that that’s the case. You know. And that puts a seed in your mind of, well, if you stick your neck out, if you take the risk of going against the grain with your reporting is anybody gong to back you up?”

Or to put it another way, you can’t trust the mainstream media, whether so-called “liberal” or not, because everyone is looking out for their own career. Doing your job honourably, by practising actual journalism and telling the public what you discover, comes a distant second. What you are always going to get is the administration’s line. And it’s exactly the same in Australia. (I know.)

Here’s part of the transcript of the program:

“  Four years ago this spring the Bush administration took leave of reality and plunged our country into a war so poorly planned it soon turned into a disaster. The story of how high officials misled the country has been told. But they couldn’t have done it on their own; they needed a compliant press, to pass on their propaganda as news and cheer them on.

 

Since then thousands of people have died, and many are dying to this day. Yet the story of how the media bought what the White House was selling has not been told in depth on television. As the war rages into its fifth year, we look back at those months leading up to the invasion, when our press largely surrendered its independence and skepticism to join with our government in marching to war.

 

How did the mainstream press get it so wrong? How did the evidence disputing the existence of weapons of mass destruction and the link between Saddam Hussein to 9-11 continue to go largely unreported? What the conservative media did was easy to fathom; they had been cheerleaders for the White House from the beginning and were simply continuing to rally the public behind the President – no questions asked.

Don’t you understand, John?

Apr 8, 2007 | Australian Values, Citizenship, Corruption, Democracy, Legal, OzPol Values, Terrorism, USPol, Values, War

Don’t you understand, John?

It wasn’t about David Hicks:

How Howard fucked himself whether Hicks came home or not.

 

Hicks might go away out of the political limelight but the way Howard has treated him will be the reason Howard loses the next election. If he does, Howard has shown what he is really like and how he really works. We will never trust him on any issue, not security, certainly, and not even the economy, because he has outed himself as just one more sleazy politician, which he is (and always was), although less ethical and more unscrupulous than most.

The government can’t use the fact of Hicks’s conviction for electoral advantage or to support its anti-terrorist credentials.

They can’t say he got what was coming to him. They can’t admit they had a hand in his release. They can’t say they approve or disapprove of the sentence, (which is a big blow for Billy Bunter, Minister for Fishnets, who said before the “trial”:

“   Material support for terrorism is an immensely difficu… an immensely serious charge”

– such a serious charge that Hicks was sentenced to an “immensely serious” 9 months. It would probably seem an eternity, however, if Hicks was forced to listen to 9 months of Billy Bunter prattling on and on in his nauseating way.)

The LATimes reports Hicks’s prosecution saying that

“  Today in this courtroom we are on the front line of the war on terrorism, face to face with the enemy,”

[…]

“If Hicks was such a menace to Western security, as the U.S. government has alleged since his arrest in December 2001, asked staff attorney Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union, “why was he given a sentence more appropriate for a drunk-driving offense?”

No-one really believed that Hicks was a real threat or even a real terrorist. But it was politically expedient for Howard and his echo-chamber to paint him so.

Robert Richter, QC, one of Australia’s most experienced criminal lawyers, said in a commentary for The Sunday Age that the trial was a sham that had wholly discredited the Pentagon’s war-crimes process.

“   The charade that took place at Guantánamo Bay would have done Stalin’s show trials proud. First there was indefinite detention without charge. Then there was the torture, however the Bush lawyers, including his attorney-general, might choose to describe it. Then there was the extorted confession of guilt.”

All that is left is the nauseating and immoral way the Government utterly abandoned a fellow Australian, the way they “threw him overboard”, and that knowledge has sunk deep into the Australian political memory alongside the other blatantly cynical lie of “children overboard”; the way the Government railroaded him and sacrificed him to its own (hoped-for) electoral advantage and as a convenient platform for mealy-mouthed political posturing.

What Australians know is that it could have been them, or someone in their own family, that became a pawn caught in Howard’s cadaverous political claw. They know that Howard would not have helped them, either, unless he saw an electoral advantage, or until he saw electoral disadvantage in inaction.

And we have watched the apologists, the far-right echo-chamber of Ackermann, Bolt, Devine, Milne, Henderson et al characterise a process which has shredded and trashed all our concepts of decency, fairness, legality and justice, which is at best unlawful and at worst treasonous, as righteous. We have watched them spin the entire process and the outcome as proper and “justified”.

If the law and the values Australians have fought for could be so easily discarded for the sake of political gain, career advancement and a false sense of security in a world made increasingly afraid by our “saviours”, then the law and our values would be worthless. But they are not. And Australians know it.

Australians like their values and they reject the chatterers’ claims that what was done was justified.

Australians will not forget what Howard did to a fellow Australian to feed his own prideful pomposity.

Australians know that Howard is infatuated with the egregious vandalising of historical notions of justice which is the hallmark of the Bush administration and of the way in which Bush (and Rove and Cheney) have systematically politicised the American bureaucracy.

Australians have known all along that the entire Guantánamo Bay exercise was a legal stinkbomb. They now know for certain that the entire exercise was a political and not a legal process because they have seen the clear evidence that Hicks’s release was politically motivated and politically engineered – engineered to help a friend, John Howard, with his own political struggle.

Australians in their wisdom recognise the jaw-dropping cynicism of Howard and Bush in their machinations about the Hicks matter and Guantánamo. Howard supported Guantánamo, acquiesced in it and promoted it while the rest of the world, including the British, had long rejected Guantánamo as an abomination,

In September 2006, in Sydney, Britain’s last Lord Chancellor, now rebadged as its first Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs, Lord Falconer, denounced Guantánamo as a “shocking affront to the principles of democracy”, accusing the United States of “deliberately seeking to put detainees beyond the rule of law…”

“   It is a part of the acceptance of the rule of law that the courts will be able to exercise jurisdiction over the executive.

“Otherwise the conduct of the executive is not defined and restrained by law.

“It is because of that principle, that the USA, deliberately seeking to put the detainees beyond the reach of the law in Guantánamo Bay, is so shocking an affront to the principles of democracy.

“Without independent judicial control, we cannot give effect to the essential values of our society.”

Appropriately enough, Lord Falconer made his comments in his Magna Carta Lecture. Magna Carta established constraints on the monarchy (or, now, the executive government). The concept of habeas corpus, a fundamental of British legal heritage, preceded even the Magna Carta. Habeas corpus enshrines the right of a person detained by the authorities to be brought before a court of law so that the legality of the detention may be examined. Habeas corpus was trashed in the US last year by Attorney General, Alberto Gonzalez, with the assistance of the Republican Party and probably under the guidance of John Yoo.

John Howard, by acquiescing in the inhuman abuse that is Guantánamo Bay, and by laws passed in Australia last year, is complicit in this fundamental assault on British-heritage legal systems.

Howard openly declared that Hicks had broken no Australian laws and therefore he was pleased to be able to have him punished by another country under their illegal system.

He was willing to, and did – as did both Ruddock and Downer – declare him guilty without his having ever been charged with any offence or any evidence tested. This is in contrast to long-standing Australian values: the right to a fair and speedy trial and the presumption of innocence.

Even Texans have tried to explain the traditional American system to other Americans:

“  In Texas, we have a fair trial and then the hanging,”

said Texas Republican, John Cornyn, ‘one of the White House’s staunchest allies on Capitol Hill’. He was defending Gonzalez’s right to be heard before being “sentenced” to political death over the US Attorneys affair.

And conservative(-ish), Andrew Sullivan, in The Atlantic Online, says

“   So Cheney goes to Australia and meets with John Howard who tells him that the Hicks case is killing him in Australia, and he may lose the next election because of it. Hicks’s case is then railroaded to the front of the Gitmo kangaro court line, and put through a “legal” process almost ludicrously inept, with two of Hicks’ three lawyers thrown out on one day, then an abrupt plea-bargain, with a transparently insincere confession. Hicks is then given a mere nine months in jail in Australia, before being set free. Who negotiated the plea-bargain? Hicks’ lawyer. Who did he negotiate with? Not the prosecutors, as would be normal, but Susan J. Crawford, the top military commission official. Who is Susan J. Crawford? She served as Dick Cheney’s Inspector General while he was Defense Secretary.

My, what a surprise to see the ghastly hand of Dick Cheney over all of this!

Howard may wish that the argument was over and Hicks would cease being an issue. But the treatment of Hicks is already the main issue and the chain around Howard’s ankle attached to a block of concrete. It doesn’t matter if no-one ever mentions it again, because Howard has lost his credibility and his image as an Honest John, as someone dedicated to protect Australians, as someone who stands up for Australians. The Howard reputation is shot and nothing he can do now can change that.

Howard has shown himself to be a latter-day Pontius Pilate.

He washed his hands of Hicks and everyone knows it.

He did the same with Nguyen Tuong Van and left him to hang out to die in Singapore.

He showed similar compassion for Robert Jovocic.

He meekly acquiesced when AFP Commissioner, Michael Joseph Keelty, APM, delivered the Bali 9 – Australians who could have been dealt with in an Australian court – to the Indonesians on a deadly platter, potentially to face a firing squad.

On the other hand he showed actual concern and support for his “mates” in AWB through his and his Ministers’ timely amnesia.

Let’s be clear. Hicks is a dickhead. Probably. He is not a popular hero. He is no Ned Kelly.

It has never been about him. It has been about the rule of law. It has been about decency and propriety, about the treatment of him by this government and the political use of him by this Prime Minister.

John Howard can no longer pretend to be Australia’s political father figure. He’s shown himself to be just another politician who can’t be trusted.

We have seen what Howard did to one of the “sons” of his own country. We have seen, by contrast, what a real father does: he fights unconditionally for a son he loves, even when he disagrees with what he did.

When Australians compare John Howard with Terry Hicks they know whom they admire. And whom they despise. They know who is showing them how to be a real human being and a real Australian.

They now see all Howard’s fatuous gravitas for what it has always been – insincere, inauthentic, greedy, compassionless, political posturing. Howard, Australia now knows, is a small man of stunted character, an unethical man, a pretender, pretending that he is not the dork he has been all along.

Meanwhile, the ANU confers on the arrogant, racist despot of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, an honorary Doctorate so as to ingratiate itself with the Singapore government (which means Lee’s nepotistically installed son, effectively Van Nguyen’s executioner) for financial advantage (or, as they put it, “to further the university’s relationship with Singapore”). When such an award can be contemplated, much less approved, by an institution of higher learning and academic independence, Howard’s castration of Australia is almost complete.